On Wed, 21 Aug 2002 11:08:15 +0800, Sean Goh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> ok, so what's the deal with saying that the video card has 32mb of ram
> when it needs to use the system RAM???
Simple: you probably don't have a real video card. In fact, you probably have
some kind of embedded graphics chip on your motherboard (or integrated into your
CPU chipset). These things are cheap-'n'-nasty, and are often included in
low-cost (i.e. cheap) PCs. They don't have any memory of their own; instead they
leech off your system RAM. That way, the system vendor can say "our machine has
64MB of RAM", when the fact is that you lose much of that to the video chipset.
The same thing is happening to hard drives nowadays. Many machines preinstalled
with WinXP have several gigabytes set aside for system recovery and backups (the
'rollback' feature). Many don't even come with a Windows CD, instead relying on
this hidden partition. If you accidentally wipe that data, you're screwed. The
vendor can still say "our drives are 30GB" when you can only use 20GB of that.
I hear that Windows XP does a similar thing with network bandwidth, reserving
10-20% for itself so it can communicate with MS servers behind your back. I
don't know what it uses that bandwidth for, but it's enough to put me off MS
products for good (not that I liked them before).
--
Sridhar Dhanapalan
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."
-- informal Xerox PARC slogan
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